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Wednesday, February 10, 2010

SABC International goes bust – story courtesy of the Mail & Guardian

SABC International (Sani) has been scrapped by the public broadcaster -- at least as the ambitious 24-hour international news channel was originally envisaged.

As of January 1 this year Sani was taken off the government-run-Sentech's Vivid platform, where it had reached a handful of viewers since launching in March 2008.

An SABC statement on Thursday said the only place South Africans could see the channel now was on SABC2 between 8am and 8.30am or between 11pm and 5am on weekdays. The channel is also available on a limited broadcast in Washington, DC.

"Failure to deliver on projected audiences in line with levels of investments has prompted the scrapping of the deal," the statement read.

SABC spokesperson Kaizer Kganyago declined to comment further on the channel.

The SABC has sunk hundreds of millions of rands into the project, which was expected to become the CNN of Africa.

The channel ran with an estimated annual operating budget of between R60-million and R100-million, plus set-up costs that included a new R45-million studio and 12 international bureaux estimated to cost R20-million each.

SABC pushed MultiChoice to pick up the channel, but the deal did not materialise. This left Sani to languish on Sentech, with ineligible viewership and decoding equipment that was near impossible to purchase.

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